American Sniper may not have come out of Oscar weekend with any of the top prizes, but it did come away with a new cumulative box office of more than $320 million. That's by far the highest of any war film in history, not to mention more than all the other Oscar Best Picture nominees combined.

So many war correspondents are similar to the many men and women in uniform, who work hard, do their jobs, and even perform acts of heroism, that you'll never hear about, and who never go around bragging, seeking recognition. Then, we have Bill O'Reilly.

We don't talk much about the scale of human suffering in Southeast Asia that came from U.S. intervention. American involvement in the Middle East could usefully be informed by the Asian experience, however: namely, that war has long-lasting consequences for the local populations, to say nothing of broader impacts.

American war movies, from World War II to 2015, have produced a remarkably uniform vision of how American war works, one that, in its modern form, is undoubtedly once again lending a helping hand to our latest conflicts.

Movies, said film critic Roger Ebert, are like an "empathy machine." Their mission: to help us understand a bit more about others' hopes, their fears, their dreams. Movies allow us to walk in others' shoes. They help us "identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us."

Every month from a distant sky it came -- a reel to reel tape wrapped in plain brown paper and bearing the name of PFC Michael J. Simmons, Vietnam. He was my brother, and it was at once unsettling and comforting to hear his voice. My mother usually cried a little when he would begin to speak.

Don't think that young students are the only products of a whitewashed history of the Vietnam War. Many older Americans have also been affected by decades of distortion and revision designed to sanitize an impossibly soiled record.

I spent three months in the ABC Saigon Bureau in 1971, coming not from the States but from Moscow. An election was in progress. Vietnam had some 30 newspapers, all but one complaining that the voting was rigged, quite a contrast with the press in Soviet Russia.

For this interpretation of American Sniper to be believed, we have to assume that Hollywood embraces subtlety and that viewers have done some critical thinking about events of the past 15 years. Perhaps a stretch on both counts, but wouldn't it be nice if it were so?

As the last of the baby boomers turn 50, the first of your cohort now share that privilege. The only bad news -- the oldest of you will soon lose the coveted distinction of being advertiser's target market!

One of the wildest black comedies ever made, 1964's Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb still stands today for its daring send-up of military and governmental leaders who take American us into nuclear war.

This week, Bao Nguyen takes office as mayor of Garden Grove. He is the city's first Vietnamese-American mayor and its youngest ever to hold that office, having beat out his opponent and six-time incumbent Bruce Broadwater by just 15 votes.

No grunt slogging through the jungles of Vietnam could imagine that in 2014, 41 years after the end of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese would be welcoming back Americans as investors, tourists, advisers and protectors.

Recently, several St. Louis Rams players protested the Ferguson non-indictment, pantomiming "hands up, don't shoot" as they came on the field. But in the '60s, the intersection of sports, politics and religion reached its zenith in the person of Muhammad Ali.

From the first minutes of David Rabe's Vietnam-era play, you get the impression that this ordinary family isn't as ordinary as they may seem. Tension, turmoil, and disruption soon take hold of the family's quaint home and don't let up for hours.